New nests, new pairs...

I know I say this all the time, but CRAZY busy....chicks are fledging and I am trying to be sure we have accurate numbers, and confirming successful fledging whenever I can. Just because a chick flies away does not make it a successful fledge....we need to confirm that they are landing safely somewhere and making it back to the nest to eat. In the process of visiting many nests, it’s amazing how many new adults are out there looking for mates and territories. I found a new nest being started and read the band on a male I had never seen before. I went to another nest to check the chicks and heard all this chirping that was not coming from the nest, so I kept walking and found some dead trees with four adult ospreys perched there talking to each other. Two were banded and two were not. I only got a partial read on one band before they flew off. Today I found three ospreys circling near a nest that had failed in May. The original pair there were both unbanded, but this pair included a banded male, but again he flew off before I got it read. Clearly the growth of the population has stimulated all this increased socializing among these adults. The one band I successfully read was a three year old, so probably looking to establish a pair bond and a territory for the first time. I often see young pairs building nests and claiming a territory at this time, late in the season. The difficult thing is that we must separate frustration nests, built by pairs whose earlier breeding attempt failed, from new nests. If at least one of the pair is banded, this is fairly easy to do...but with so many unbanded birds now, it can be problematic. For good scientific methods, we can’t count one pair of ospreys twice....which can happen when they build frustration nests. When we are counting nests, we are really counting pairs of ospreys. A pair that builds multiple nests can’t be counted twice without skewing the data. Now that we have some fairly dense clusters of nests, and unbanded birds, it’s not always easy to figure things out. So I make many visits, carefully noting feather markings, birds going back and forth between two nests, defending two nests. It’s exciting, fun, educational and exhausting.